


Spring, Glass, Fireworks

by doublelead



Category: Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Children's Literature, Fairy Tale Elements, Gen, Post-Canon, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-17
Updated: 2018-07-17
Packaged: 2019-06-11 23:10:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15326457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublelead/pseuds/doublelead
Summary: It’s spring, in his mind’s eye. A quiet corner in the worn cobblestones of his old home, a row of potted lobelias overturned on the windowsill, clicks, cricket chirping, Sulpher pawing at the stars from behind the glass pane.





	Spring, Glass, Fireworks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sonidobinaria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonidobinaria/gifts).



> a birthday present for [Jen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sonidobinaria) _~~but also the misdirected result of ten years worth of pent up urge to write Vayne and Isolde talk postgame~~_ who wanted an Atelier fic or anything with Vayne!! Happy birthday again!!!! Next time, I'll try to write you quality Firis content [eye emojis softly]

Sulpher has never really given him a clear answer – non-committal as he is, between licking the back of his paw, brushing stray a tuff of fur behind his ear – whenever Vayne has questions about his father. As much as a cat could shrug, the only thing he deigned to offer, other than a scoff and a turn of his nose up, is _'blue,'_ like it was something particularly insulting.

He soon learns not to ask. No use talking about someone whose face he doesn’t even remember, anyway. Sulpher is definitely more than ready to discuss literally anything else, and Vayne’s happy to go along with that.

Still though, he can’t help but be curious.

His eyes are blue – did his father have blue eyes too? Was that what he meant?

Or was it blue like the strip of the sky, from the window by the cauldron back home? Was that what Sulpher used to see everyday, from over his father’s shoulder?

Vayne looks down to the book he’s holding, soot-covered fingers smearing dust against the cover. _Avis and the Blue Parasol,_ _Mattheas Erinus_.

_Ah―_

The next breath he draws is short, though it lingers, in the slight pause of his fingers, millimetres above the embossed title. Vayne thinks he might have remembered a smile he couldn’t quite recognise, a voice, muffled, fragmented words he couldn’t really understand, a sunlit room, cornflowers.

_If he wasn’t mistaken―_

“Ah, sure brings back memories, doesn’t it?” Vayne nearly drops the book as he startles, fumbling to hold itto his chest when he turns to the library doorway. Professor Ermentraud smiles, regards the rest of his workshop with a small, curt nod before turning back to him. “I used to read that book as a little girl as well.”

Vayne couldn’t see them, but he thinks he hears someone fall off a ladder somewhere at the back of the room.

The accompanying yelp tells him it that it might be Niké.

He can never be too sure, though. As far as casualties are concerned, unfortunately, anyone in his team is as likely to hurt themselves as the other.

It’s probably some form of divine intervention that they’re able to assemble by the shelf closest to the entrance without discovering a new frontier of trouble. Vayne half-expected they would sooner cause further damage to the cacophonous chaos of books cluttered around them before they could even think of forming anything remotely reminiscent of a semi-neat-ish, half-circle-like line.

“Perfect timing, actually – that you’re holding that,” Professor Ermentraud continues. Seven soot-smudged faces blinks at her, heads tilted in varying degrees of curiosity. They’ve been on shelving duty for so long that anything sounds enticing right now.

Vayne can’t remember what got them punished in the first place. All he knows is that he hasn’t seen his face clean for more than the few meagre minutes he spends brushing his teeth before bed since summer holidays started.

It is now currently well into the last week of their break.

He thinks he’s starting to forget the actual colour of his hair.

“Don’t tell Miss Isolde this, but I feel like you’ve done more than enough―” Vayne could barely hear Professor Ermentraud finish her sentence, over everyone about a millisecond away from vibrating through the nearest wall and into freedom, had not she cleared her throat, raising the volume of her voice just enough, to be heard above his friends’. “ _I_ _n exchange,_ _however,_ I’m putting you lot in charge of the fireworks for the festival.”

 _Ah_ ―

_That’s right―_

 

* * *

 

 

“You know,” Philomele starts. “Making a bunch of kids who blew a hole through their atelier synthesize fireworks sounds like a pretty bad idea.”

 _Oh,_ so that’s what they were in trouble for. Vayne remembers now. He’s still not entirely sure if he had simply repressed the memory or not, though.

Anna clears her throat from where she assumed post on the loft as supervisor. Nobody flinches, proceeds to go about their individual tasks, continuing their conversation even as Philomele weighs thrice the amount of gunpowder needed.

At this point, everyone is probably assuming efficiency for the next few batches rather than the worst – for their own peace of mind. Philomele can’t have not learned her lesson, right?

_Right?_

“Maybe they found out that we had talent from that?” Pamela suggests, as she floats to where Roxis is, with a stack of individually weighed copper chloride salts in different petri plates.

“This should suffice,” Roxis says, taking one of the samples labelled _copper ii_ in Pamela’s bubbly cursive. He tilts the contents into the cauldron, along with the ground taun he already has with him in his mortar. “Also, I honestly doubt that. Clearly they’re testing us for safety procedures.”

“Your whole life is a safety procedure.” Gunnar shrugs, providing nothing insightful, from the other end of the preparation table.

“Vayne.” Roxis is smart. That’s why he doesn’t dignify Gunnar with a response. “Turn off the lights, would you?”

Roxis is also especially smart, because unlike Vayne, he looks for someone to boss around, instead of walking across the room while holding a pair of tongs attached to a very hot, very reactive flask on the other end.

That very specific, very familiar, very much has happened before hazard, is also why they’ve all collectively decided to leave him in charge of the cauldron.

“Eital,” he calls, turning on his heels to take the few short steps to the preparation table. His mana appears from over his shoulders in a soft glow, a wisp of light curling down his arm, around the flask, a spark that ignites as the room falls dark.

Brilliant blue blooms in cascades against the glass surface, refracted light bouncing up the walls, the odd stray flicker or so brushing Vayne’s shoes before it disappears. He’s reminded again – dazed as he is, blurred lines at the edge of his sight, in a midst of a backscatter shower – of the picture book he had found earlier in the library.

It’s spring, in his mind’s eye. A quiet corner in the worn cobblestones of his old home, a row of potted lobelias overturned on the windowsill, clicks, cricket chirping, Sulpher pawing at the stars from behind the glass pane.

‘ _Avis vanished in a flash of blue, the hem of her dress weaved into the wind. Her parasol was the only thing left of her. Cornflower colours, lace-like petals, the hilltop meadow under the shadow of its canopy.’_

 

* * *

 

 

“I don’t think I’ve seen fireworks before,” Vayne says.

“You’re not missing out,” Philomele replies from where she sits next to him, uncharacteristically quiet. She pulls her legs towards herself, curling in as she rests her chin on top of her knees. Her smile is a little hard to read, when she turns to face him, strained at the tips, eyebrows drawn tight together. “Don’t give me that! I don’t blow things up because I want to!”

He can’t think of a way respond, but he has a feeling that Philomele isn’t looking for one. So he stays quiet, lets the rustle and clatter of his friends setting up for the display bridge the silence between them.

“I get particularly restless during summer nights, too.” She stops to chuckle, at Gunnar brandishing a lightened sparkler in each hand, a battle cry over the setting sun before he begins to chase a screaming Niké around the rooftop.

“It’s nothing to worry about, though!” And then softer, to herself, as if she never meant for him to hear in the first place. “At least, not for a while longer.”

The way Philomele plays with her thumbs makes him imagine how she would have been before coming to Al-Revis: watching the neighbourhood festival outside her bedroom window through the ripples in her teacup. Vayne would have heard as much of that summer’s excitement as she did, from where he lived deep in the forest. _A bonfire glow lining the tops of the trees below the hill―_

Philomele’s quiet presence, immediately beside him, gravitates him somehow, despite the buzz of excitement from everyone else around them, chasing smoke trails higher and higher up the sky.

― _fireworks he couldn’t hear, but clearly felt, across the floor rumbling under his bare feet._

* * *

 

 

 

“I’m sorry,” he mutters to the ground. “That I couldn’t have been anything else.”

He flinches, at the breath Isolde takes, toes curling in his shoes. The sudden movement greets him with a sharp pain from his shoulder, down his broken arm – one that hasn’t healed as eerily quick as it would have, before last week. It’s a reminder that he’s human, now. As human as his friends are, and as human as Isolde is, too, worst off than he is, bandages still covering her body as she sits, propped up against a stack of pillows on the infirmary bed.

Melanie had only then, let her have visitors – recovering and under house arrest as she is, until the teacher’s council decides what to do with her.

Vayne braves a peek out the window to his left. They’ve more or less fixed the walkways lining the courtyard, fissures covered and rocks cleared away. Students and teachers alike are bustling about, working to repair the rest of the damaged school structures. He sees a girl from his class roll on what looks to be clear paint, over an empty wooden frame, and – almost like magic – a strip of glass solidifies, as if it had been a brand new window pane to begin with.

‘ _That mus_ _t be_ _the liquid glass Roxis_ _was working on_ _,’_ he thinks in idle wonder. His chest hurts, breathing past the dull pain, as he starts to chew on his lip. _‘_ _I_ _don’t_ _think_ _I could_ _hate_ _alchemy in the end_ _._ _’_

Then, even when he tries not to let it cross his mind, not after they’ve gone through all of this, but, still, _‘Maybe_ _it was just me.’_

“I’ve never thought to think of you as anything else but Avis’ parasol,” Isolde finally says. Vayne turns back towards her, to find that she’s not facing him, hands folded on neatly her lap, expression carefully schooled.

He wonders, if it still hurts, to look. At him, at how much he’s still a remainder of his father’s mistakes.

“You grew to overcome that.” She makes it a point to scoff, small, bitter. “No thanks to him.”

“I’m sorry _―”_

“No. I’m grateful.” Isolde’s voice is clipped, strained under a hitch in her breath. “It’s not your _―”_ She pauses, through a long, staggered exhale, takes a moment to gather her thoughts. “This is difficult. For myself, as well.”

If Vayne’s arm wasn’t in a cast, he would have already brought his fingers together, picking at his nails by way of an answer. Every other sound is a little too distant for him to keep track, muffled behind closed doors and cold stone walls, but he had lost count of the seconds too, from the clock ticking on Melanie’s desk.

He waits for her, unmoving, from where he stands by her bedside.

A patch of sunlight clears, streaming past the window down to the vase of lobelias on the nightstand. His eyes are drawn to the bright blue petals, and then to the copy of Avis and the Blue Parasol left under it.

“I’ve never liked that picture book,” she tries. “They painted her a tragic heroine, poetry in her ending.”

“I’m sorry,” Vayne says again, before he could stop himself.

“Avis was a fool and so was Theophrastus.”

He grits his teeth this time, against the sharp pain he feels, recoiling at how harsh, final, the tone of her voice takes.

“He doesn’t deserve to see what you’ve turned out to be.” Isolde’s shoulders drop, the most resigned she’s ever seen him. She sighs, deep, pathos in the heart of every word she speaks after. “In a way, that is his eternal punishment.”

Vayne’s breath shapes over the things he doesn’t say, held back under the guise of the myriad of words he isn’t confident he could articulate, no matter how much he wants to. He hesitates, stops himself once, twice, a twitch in his fingers he curls back into his palm. Feelings are still a thing he’s trying to understand, and this is one hell of a way to start – a gale when he has only recently sailed through a drizzle.

“I’ll come visit you?” He settles, instead, for a timid chuckle.

The first time Isolde looks at him throughout this conversation, is also the first time she smiles at him.

“And that, would be mine.”

 

* * *

 

 

“Are you sure you want this to be the first place you visit?”

“ _Uh-huh!_ It meant a lot to you, so it means a lot to us, too!” They’ve given Pamela a parasol, so that they could see her under the daytime sky. Her feet are still crystalline though, see-through over the blades of glass between her toes.

Vayne doesn’t remember the climb to be this gruelling, considering the amount of time he had spent trudging through different forests and ruins with questionable trail conditions. Looking over his shoulder behind him, he finds comfort in the fact that everyone is just as out of breath as he is. Roxis’ long overcoat doesn’t help him one bit, and Vayne tries not to laugh at him too hard. At least, not where he could see.

They’re all out of shape, it seems, between their last adventure, and then the extra month-long holiday before their graduation. Gunnar tries to hide it, but his steps are starting to feel a little heavy, too.

It’s spring, right in front of him, in the way Pamela’s white sundress flutters at her knees.

It’s spring, just like it was three years ago. The black turtle-neck Vayne wears is the same one he had wore back then – just that now, he has a flower corsage pinned over his left chest, one that matches his friends’, along with the black certificate tube case they’re holding.

It’s spring – cornflowers in full bloom overtaking his porch, nestled in a puddle of the sun where Pamela folds her parasol closed.


End file.
